My office over here at 77 Langsford St. doubles as a guest room, so when company comes, I head to the basement. It’s more crowded with junk down there, but it’s very quiet. No interruptions other than the sounds of the building’s machinery starting and stopping. I used this writing hole even before we moved over here, for exactly that reason. I was working on a novel and I wanted to hear myself think – nobody else! Eventually a publisher named Spuyten Duyvil picked it up. They publish modern writing and avant garde stuff, and I’m interested to see how they’ll handle my book.
All of the books I’ve published have been collaborations between me and an editor assigned to my project by the company that bought it. The editor, usually a full-time employee of the publishing house, has a good idea of why his bosses decided to invest money in my book, and how, in the most general terms, they want it to appear when published. Much of this is visual – book design considerations and so forth, but the editing process also involves textual changes. These are suggested by the editor who, presumably, also knows what the bosses want the book to sound like. This is always a collaborative effort – I want the book to sell, too! But it involves a lot of compromise and a lot of work. One of the stupidest things I’ve heard recently was from a guy who was bragging that his book got published without the editor changing a single word! He thought that was the height of success, but his too-long and rather uneven book was an elegant argument for the importance of working with an editor.
Most of the day, I’m down here working on the next catalog, and tending to all the details of running a used book business. But I’m usually able to steal an hour or so in the morning, and sometimes even a few minutes at night, to work on the next book. This one’s another crime novel. It’s going to be called, provisionally, Uncle Willie. I published a snippet from it in this blog last June 21, so I’m not going to bore you with any more of my deathless prose.
Instead, I’ll bore you with an observation occasioned by working on this blog entry.
I love old book catalogs. Everyone one of them has a sort of personality that reflects the personality of its creator. Some are grand, some are grandiose. Some stick largely to issues of bibliographical interest, others use bibliography as a launching pad for wildly exaggerated claims of importance, or for philosophical flights, bookish drolleries, or even for score-settling with other dealers. I produced about 250 printed issues of my catalogs before I went all-digital. They were humble affairs, but I like to think that most of my wild exaggerations were offset by drollery and common sense. They were also, between printing and mailing costs, rather expensive and quite a lot of work. That’s what’s so brilliant about virtual cataloging – it’s virtually free!
But at what cost?
Unless you’re a professional designer/techie, the format of your catalog will be restricted to the parameters of one of several cookie-cutter designs. Think of ChrisLands bookselling websites. No matter what you do, there’s always something something that says “ChrisLands” about them. In this way, all those catalogs I open on the web every week have a certain unavoidable sameness to them. Picture, description, price. Sure, hard copy catalogs contain the same elements, but there’s something about them that makes them memorable, and a pleasure to handle.
Maybe it’s because they’re books!
I keep thinking I’ll produce one more grand catalog that people will remember me by, if they so choose. But my country-mouse economics make it difficult to assemble a large selection of rare books. I’m a slave top cash flow! And, just to add insult to the situation, I don’t have the time to produce a catalog that will stand the test of time.
Maybe after I retire… Meanwhile, keep up the good work, you catalog slingers!
Oh, the other thing about the basement is that being down here reminds me how many books I have yet to catalog and sell.
I think I’ll get back to work now.
Bill Leavenworth says
Keep the catalogs coming! I can’t often buy, but I enjoy looking at them!